THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, June 24, 1995 TAG: 9506210014
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 92 lines
Formation last year of the Virginia Urban Partnership was the first sign that Virginia's business and local-government leaders had acknowledged that the deterioration of core cities undermines the economic health of the states' metropolitan regions - and, thus, the state itself - by diminishing the regions' appeal to businesses and other investors.
The emergence of the Urban Partnership also signaled that business executives, bankers and core cities' officials had set out to remedy the defects that handicap Virginia's push to accelerate economic development that generates jobs, tax revenue and other benefits.
The Urban Partnership has since placed the issue of aiding Virginia's core cities and narrowing income disparity between core cities and their neighboring new cities or counties prominently on the public agenda. The Urban Affairs Forum in Norfolk June 15 elevated the issue's visibility by bringing together business and municipal officials from across the state to discuss ways to improve core cities' economic condition and to further regional cooperation to strengthen Virginia's hand in the competition for new industries and retention and expansion of the state's existing enterprises.
The couple of hundred people at the one-day forum, held at the Norfolk's Waterside Marriott, were exposed to data arguing that regions blighted by declining core cities do less well than regions in states whose urban policies foster regional economic-development activity and ease the socioeconomic burdens that core cities bear - poverty; welfare; deteriorating housing stock; and high illiteracy, illegitimacy, disease and crime rates.
Findings presented to the forum by William H. Lucy and David L. Phillips, professors of urban and environmental planning at the University of Virginia School of Architecture, documented the more-thansix-times-faster rise in earnings per employee in the private sector in North Carolina from 1970 to 1990 than in Virginia metropolitan areas located wholly within the state.
Professors Lucy and Phillips note that shrinkage of the federal government could weaken Northern Virginia's contribution to the state economy in the future.
Even more cheerless for Virginians than conjecture about Northern Virginia is the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis' projections through the year 2020 of a continuing rise in real earnings per private job in North Carolina while real earnings in five of Virginia's six metropolitan areas decline relative to the average for the Southeast.
From 1970 through 1990, earnings per private employee increased in Raleigh/Durham by 11.9 percent and in Charlotte/Gastonia by 11.6 percent, compared with a 2.1 percent decline in Hampton Roads and a 3.7 percent increase in Richmond-Petersburg. The three most-populous North Carolina metropolitan areas (Greensboro/Winston-Salem/High Point is the third) did better than the three most-populous wholly within-Virginia urban areas (Roanoke is the third) in total employment, private employment, nonfarm earnings per capita and earnings per private-sector employee.
How to reverse the negative trends in Virginia? Reforms in state policy to help cities help themselves are essential.
And Norfolk Southern CEO David R. Goode, in his keynote address to the forum, called for other changes (see excerpts from his speech to the right).
Speaking from his perspective as leader of ``a company that operates in 20 states, each with its own economic-development strategy,'' Mr. Goode noted a lack of ``regional cohesion'' in Virginia's metro areas, including Hampton Roads.
``What is needed,'' said Mr. Goode, ``. . . is fundamental change in the way city governments work together; in the way they are willing to work together, and in the way they are allowed to work together.''
In short, Hampton Roads' cities must join forces to project Southeastern Virginia as a swell place to live and prosper. Unfortunately, as Mr. Goode stated, intercity rivalry is still the norm, with localities competing against each other for new industries and entertainment and sport facilities - even luring enterprises from each other, which gains the region little or nothing.
On the Peninsula, business and local-government leaders held their second annual meeting last week to explore regional cooperation. No equivalent meetings are held in South Hampton Roads.
Meanwhile, the absence of a unified Peninsula-South Hampton Roads campaign to sell Hampton Roads to the world as a splendid location for plants, distribution centers and other ventures denies the region that competitive edge it would acquire by projecting a ``regional identity.'' As Mr. Goode pointed out, Hampton Roads sorely needs a regional identity to compete effectively for business's favor against the likes of ``Jacksonville, Charlotte and San Antonio.''
That the five South Hampton Roads cities will collectively contribute $140,000 to the Hampton Roads Chamber of Commerce's Forward Hampton Roads economic-development fund is an encouraging sign. But much more must be done to mount a regional economic-development drive that producing [produces] dramatic results. The Peninsula must participate as well. Fragmented economic-development efforts will never create the regional identify that yields big dividends. MEMO: regionalism economic development by CNB